Lio

The answer might be that he’s actually far less successful than he claims.

That’s the reason why he won’t let anyone see his tax returns.

He shutdown his court case against the BBC rather than open the books to the lawyers.

This is a bloke that failed at running casinos. A business where suckers just hand you their money. And he failed.

He just “ain’t right good” at business but has the ego of The Big Lebowski.

Whenever I hear about people giving it all up to live on a boat I remember Suzanne Heywood's account[1] of growing up like that.

It doesn't look like it was a very pleasant life for her or her brother. She describes it stealing her childhood. That's one reason not to do it.

It's something that looks glamorous from the outside but a bit grim when you really consider what's involved.

Worse things happen at sea, as they say.

(I still love their website and ideas, I just know I wouldn't want to inflict that lifestyle on my family).

1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/mar/25/suzanne...

Who does? In the words of a wise man, "People listen to Coldplay and voted for Hitler. You can't trust people". :P

The funny thing is that for a long time I probably would have programmed for fun, without getting paid.

It was the hobby I was really happy to turn into a full time, paying job.

I know I'm not alone in that either. I used to joke with colleagues about not letting the boss know how much we enjoyed the work.

> English Empire

You mean British Empire.

The Act of Union had at least two willing parties.

In the nicest possible way, why should someone have to justify themselves to control a machine they’ve paid for?

If you can’t control something so basic about your computer such as removing things you don’t want how can you be sure it’s acting in your interests in general?

For the sake of argument what would happen if she had kept the diary locally and claude code scanned the file?

What would happen if it had scanned a file it didn’t have permission to look at and found this threat?

I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand if you’re using claude as a diary you have no expectation of privacy and she was talking about committing a very serious crime.

This still makes me feel queasy though.

I was looking at Renault electric cars recently.

I was pleased to that you can use the navigation with a data collection opt-out. I was less pleased to see that they sneaked a "safety and maintenance" clause into the terms. The information they gather for that gets shared with insurance companies, social networks and data brokers.

There's no hiding in modern car it seems. I was hoping for better from a French company operating under GDPR but no.

You can't win, with all the car companies pulling this crap it's like fighting a surveillance cartel.

The only thing to do is keep my old car for as long as possible.

I'm the same in my car but luckily for us they can grab the data over the OBD2 port when they do the servicing. :(

I've met "pro surveillance" people before. There's a surprising number of "normies" in favour of it.

I remember being shocked, about 10 years ago, when I mentioned social network spying and my sister in law remarked she thought there should be more of it to keep people inline.

I've also met people who think all internet access should be through government sanctioned id and monitoring, which I also find shocking.

I haven't been able to pin this down to a single political view point, these people come from across the spectrum.

> It was conservative in name only.

The ol' "No True Scotsman"[1] defence, eh?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.

That won't help you if you can't refine it. Russia has more oil than most and has/had lots of refineries. Ukraine has taken out so many of them that Trump is complaining it's affecting the price of diesel (even though the US also has lots of oil and lots of refineries).

Oil infrastructure is temporary, expensive and fragile whereas panels work for 30 years.

This was all done under right wing governments of the Conservative Party.

A diesel generator needs a supply of fuel that can be trivially blockaded as Iran is so successfully doing.

The whole world is suffering from the effects of that disruption.

The supply of diesel itself also requires refineries and they can't be moved or rebuilt quickly either.

Ukraine is doing a sterling job of attacking Russia's refineries. All the portable diesel generators in world won't help you invade another country if you have no fuel to run them and no supply lines.

A small portable balcony setup costing a few hundred dollars, the type sold in supermarkets in Europe, will run every day and keep you alive.

There's nothing the enemy can do about it other than a direct hit and that would take out your generator and fuel anyway.

Is this real? You have to be really careful what goes into a furnace crucible.

I can't say this isn't but if these robots had any hydraulic fluid or liquid in their batteries I would expect to see a pretty serious explosion as it evaporates.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLxRJlcNh2A

Not sure it could be worse for privacy but even it was it would still stop Visa and Mastercard from refusing to carry payments.

That's exactly what they did to high profile European judges. You can't pull that stunt and expect to get away with it long term.

https://www.euronews.com/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-turn-intern...

Not only is it a solution looking for a problem but it also opens up exchange fees and chance to be more easily robbed by North Korean government backed hackers looking to evade sanctions.

https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/28/north-korean-hackers-sus...

It looks like the memory bandwidth has grown a little bit, from 256GB/s to 273GB/s. Not sure if that's worth upgrading to to but I'd definitely want it if buying new.

> are there a lot of passenger cars in Europe that use diesel?

Yes there are. I drive a diesel car. My car is old and very cheap to run as I don't do much driving. It's not clean but it's very efficient. I can pretty easily get between 57-67mpg (Imperial units) and my record on a long, slow drive was 82mpg.

Because of a quirk in the tax rules for year of my car it's taxed on the efficiency rather than the emissions. My car's VED tax is £20 a year. A new car of any type would be > £200 yearly plus a tax on mileage.

It just about makes sense to keep still but I'm giving serious consideration to getting rid of it for a new car.

One thing I can be sure of my next car will a BEV. It's crazy we allow foreign powers to have so much control over our lives like this.

To be brutally honest as an outsider, it looks like Trump just started this war to distract from his part in the Epstein files and we're now carrying the consequences. Madness.

Compared the old 2020 Leaf the current model has around 387 mile range, which I think is enough that I wouldn't worry about range.

They also charge a lot faster now it's using a CCS connector.

There's plenty of other models providing that range too such as Renault Scenic.

I don't think hybrids are worth the extra complexity at all now. All those little moving engine parts are going to wear out sooner or later.

ps Is it bad that I still laugh at calling a place "bumfuck"?

Yes, I wanted to ask what that is too. I don't think we have that term here either and I'm finding that sentence a bit hard to parse.

Without trying to be funny, it reads like a student who's job it is to support another student's emotions. That can't be right though, is it?

Yeah it's a good way of avoiding lowercase hot takes and cry-laugh emoji people.

Well DHH launched Rails and he owns this Rails Word conference so it's not too surprising he gave the opening keynote.

As he's no longer interested in Ruby or Rails, or at least by his own admission he's retired from programming, perhaps he'll do the decent thing and just step aside for more interested speakers to take over.

Aaron is a breath of fresh air, which is amazing considering he's been doing it for so long and so consistently.

Aaron is exactly what you want in a community leader.

He's consistency both technical and funny. Plus he seems like a decent bloke overall (based on meeting him once in passing 15 years ago).

Home taping saves music! :P

This is not that surprising the big Japanese manufacturers have worked with many American and European engineers for some of their most beloved instruments.

E.g. Akai working with Roger Linn on MPC and Chris Huggett on the S1000 sampler.

Or Dave Smith working with Yamaha and Korg on physical modelling and wave sequencing.

You could say he now owns file permissions.

> Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.

How does any of this make him a Luddite?

Luddites weren’t anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers that actually wanted to be involved with it.

They wanted technology to serve them not make their conditions worse as they worked with it.

This guy just doesn’t to sell his farm. That’s not the same at all.

How many keys do you want?

Something like a Yamaha CK61 would give you pretty light weight and compact 61 note battery powered keyboard with, I think, pretty good samples.

I have the bigger CK88 hammer action version and like it a lot.

You think Celtic Brits don't count as white? Have you seen us? We're some of the pastiest looking people you will ever meet. I could get sunburnt opening the fridge.